Male lazuli buntings sing a sweet and complex series of whistles, chips and warble phrases slurred together. The cadence is both fast and varied and while always bunting-ish, may be slightly different for every bird.?You know when the voice that answers your phone call at a friend’s house is indistinguishable between father and teenage son? Not so with lazuli buntings. Young males skip right over adopting their fathers’ songs and instead, piece together sound bites of buntings singing around them in their first breeding year, or they adopt whole songs similar to those of their neighbors.?Birds in one area will sound slightly different than birds in another area. If you add the tendency for birds to have accents and dialects just like people do, it can become a song soup.?See what I mean? Not my fault. Birds’ fault.?This song is coated in Teflon and slides right out of my head. It’s an auditory greased pig, a Houdini-esque sound that escapes just when I think I’ve locked it down and it’s trapped in there forever.?I’m a birder by ear and believe that the more birds you can identify by sound, the more birds you’ll see. I’ve memorized beaucoup species and have likely heard thousands of lazuli buntings in my birding experience.?But bragging aside, experience made no difference when I heard a first-of-the-spring, vaguely familiar bird song at Beus Park a couple weeks ago. I thought, “Is that … a green-tailed towhee? An American goldfinch? No, wait! A warbler … a yellow warbler? Nope; what warbler is that, anyway?”?Then, of course, it struck me that the buntings were back and up to their usual tomfoolery. They were playing stump the dummy with me, and this dummy was losing.?I forgave them completely for their shenanigans when they showed up at my feeder. Male lazuli buntings are like brilliant dollops of the turquoise Caribbean Sea. Their color is breathtaking and makes me wonder how The Big Guy came up with it. In addition to turquoise head, back, wings and tail, they also have a thick band of bright rust across their breast and bright white wing bars and belly.?The turquoise color, however, is another bit of tomfoolery. That color is not found in nature as a pigment, just as with most other blues, purples, greens and iridescent tones of birds. It’s called a structural color, and is produced when light of a specific wavelength, that which produces turquoise light, reflects off special tiny cells in the birds’ feathers. Wavelengths that produce other colors in the spectrum are canceled when they don’t align and reflect as well, thus, we only see the turquoise (or the blue of a scrub-jay, or the iridescent gorget of a hummingbird).?Pigment versus structural color makes no difference to my eyeballs, however. A lazuli bunting’s turquoise is unbelievably intense, and is the reason the bird was named after the semi-precious stone.?The ground beneath my millet feeder becomes a seething mass of turquoise early in the season, and then punctuated with dull rust when the much plainer females arrive later. My high count this spring was 24 at once. Other birders have reported numbers into the thirties.?Haven’t had success with lazuli buntings visiting your feeders? Head to the Bonneville Shoreline Trail for the opportunity to see the males teed up and singing on scrub-oak every few hundred yards, and for them to wallop your memory bank’s inability to ingrain this song.?The trail offers quintessential bunting habitat: Scrubby, brushy spots with grassy openings and trees nearby. I birded the trail from Weber State to Rainbow Gardens recently, and the predominant species was the lazuli.?While males defended their territory with songs that I probably won’t remember, and chased away intruding males, females skulked in the underbrush and harvested grasses for the nests they’re building in hidden places. A few years ago, I watched a female’s furtive behavior long enough to realize she was building a neat grassy cup in a sagebrush along the Birdsong Trail. It was a Lilliputian masterpiece.?But last week, I paid most attention to the males. I wrapped their song in mental Velcro and stuck it inside my head when I left the Bonneville Shoreline. I hope it will still be there the next time I fumble for it.?

Kristin Purdy can be reached at gobirding@comcast.net.